WordPress On Page SEO – Everything you need to know

With over 3,597,691 downloads, WordPress is one of the most powerful CMS (content management systems) on the web. Many people believe that WordPress is SEO-friendly right out of the box.. but unfortunately, this is far from the truth. WordPress SEO is more than just installing a plugin and letting it fly. It requires some customization and work to get WordPress working seamlessly with the search engines. In this guide, I am going to cover every topic about WordPress SEO… From the best plugins to using social signal

WordPress SEO: On Page

Out of the box, WordPress has some decent default SEO options like SEO-friendly URLs, clean code (depending on template), robots.txt, rss feeds and some other basic pieces. We are going to take a look at some on-page optimization techniques that make WordPress SEO-friendly.

Themes & SEO

The theme that you choose can be very important for how you rank in the search engines and the overall SEO-friendliness of WordPress. Most themes are created by 3rd party companies and designers so they aren’t actually search engine friendly. Its important to find a WordPress template (if you are going that route) that is SEO-friendly and not bulked up with visual editors and un-needed plugins.

Make sure that the template you choose is coded with SEO in mind or you may have to change the template up a little bit to be more SEO-friendly.

Some template designers create hidden backlinks in their templates so be sure to do an external link check to see if your linking to somewhere you don’t want to be linking to.

Permalinks

Your permalink structure has a strong influence on your rankings and how your results look in the search engines. The permalink structure of your site is how your URLs are structured in the WordPress system.

By default, your permalink structure is as follows:

http://www.example.com/?p=123

This permalink structure uses the post id to return the post. The problem with this structure is that its not pretty, it doesn’t contain any keywords, and the URL is hard to remember (since they are numbers).

Plain – Default WordPress setting and not ideal for any website looking to gain SEO. This is a good setting for development because you can easily enter in post numbers in the URL for easy testing.

Day and name – Good for new sites that are posting news stories and content mulitple times per day. This structure allows to differentiate between similar named posts on different days.

Month and name – Another good structure to use for news sites but leaves out the day. Good structure for news sites publishing weekly.

Numeric – This numeric based setting is similar to plain but a little more SEO-friendly because it contains the section (archive, category, single). This setting is not recommenced for SEO.

Post name – Post name is probably the most popular structure for WordPress websites. It provides clean, keyword rich URLs without a deep folder structure. Post name is great for blogs with long or timeless content that is unique.

Custom Structure – The custom structure allows you to use variables to create your own WordPress permalink structure.

Here are all the variables for custom permalink structures and their defined values:

%post_id% – The id of the post

%category% – the category of the post

%postname% – The post slug of the post

%year% – The year of the post

%monthnum% – The month the article was published

%day% – The day the post was published

%hour% – The hour the post was published

%minute% – The minute the post was published

%second% – The second the post was published

%author% – The author of the post

Choosing the right permalink structure has a decent impact on how your site will rank in Google, Bing and other search engines.

If you have a news site that will feature content daily with the chance of possible duplicate post slugs (ie, /samsung-galaxy-news/ could be used more than once) then you should choose ‘day and name, otherwise you should use ‘post name’.

URL Parameters

URL Parameters are variables passed through the URL that effect the search engine optimization of WordPress. These variables can create duplicate content issues and confusion in the Google search index. Here are some examples of URL parameters you may see:

All of these URLs are seen the same by google which can cause some problems. Google will not be able to figure out which URL is the correct URL you want to use. To stop Google from indexing each of these pages as a seperate page simply download and install theYoast SEO plugin. It has an option to remove these un-needed URL parameters.

Install the plugin (we will be referencing this plugin again later) and go to advanced settings.

In the Permalinks section you will see a setting to remove ?replytocom variables as well as redirect ugly URLs to clean permalinks… Check both of these options.

Also make sure to enable the prevention of cleaning analytics and Adwords campaign parameters so you can track your traffic campaigns.

If you have any other parameters that you would like to keep on your URLs, then enter them in the box at the bottom so that they don’t get striped out of the URL.

The other option (which you should do as well) is enabling canonical URLs. This tells Google and other search engines the original URL of your page or post. Once you install Yoast SEO plugin, canonical URLs should be enabled.

Archives & Taxonomies

WordPress comes default with a few different types of taxonomies that are indexable by search engines. Possible duplicate content issues can arise with the following taxonomies:

Date Based

Tag Based

Category Based

All of these archive pages can create a ton of duplicate content with Wordpress so you must noindex/follow these taxonomies.

To do so, just head to the Yoast SEO Plugin and go to advanced settings. Once there, choose the other tab and you will see a switch to noindex archive subpages.

When disabled, Google and other search engines will not index your archive pages so that users don’t enter your site on an archive and instead find the main category or taxonomy page. It will also remove any duplicate content issues.

Google Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

Google webmaster tools is a suite provided by Google that lets webmasters view and manage their websites in Google. In Google webmaster tools you can submit your sitemaps to Google, view your rankings (although it’s not very accurate), see crawl errors and a ton of other great resources.

It’s important for WordPress SEO that you sign up with google webmaster tools to submit your website and XML sitemap. To do this we recommend using the Yoast SEO Plugin which creates and updates your XML sitemap for you automagically.

Simply enable XML sitemaps in SEO->XML Sitemaps using the Yoast SEO plugin. Once you do this a sitemap will be created in /your_blog_directory/sitemap_index.xml. You can hide or show different post types, users, posts and taxonomies that you want to be included or hidden in your sitemap.

We recommended including posts, pages, categories and tags (if you use them).

Once your XML sitemap is created, head over to google webmaster tools and add your sitemap.

Click Crawl->Sitemaps and you will see where you can add/test sitemap.

This will also show you any errors your sitemap has so keep reloading until it finishes pending to see if it has uploaded correctly. Google should now know all your WordPress pages that you want indexed in their search results

Canonical URLs

Canonical URL tags are a somewhat new (in the last few years) tag that tells spiders and bots what the URL of a certain page is. This is useful for sites that have content or products that are found at mulitple URLs. This can sometimes be flagged as duplicate content so the canonical URL helps not harm your rankings by telling the search engine its the same URL.

Code:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.tytonseo.com/">

In WordPress SEO, canonical URLs are very important because there is a good amount of duplicate content issues you can run into with WordPress. As mentioned before there are plenty of plugins to add canonical URLs to WordPress pages but we suggest Yoast SEO Plugin as it adds canonical URLs by default.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is kind of like an instruction guide for search engines which tells web robots (like Googlebot) what to include in their index and what not too. The robots.txt is a simple text file that place in the root folder of your website.

The way Google uses the robot.txt file in WordPress has changed significantly over the years. You used to just block /wp-includes/ but this no longer works.

Bots now fetch everything on your website including CSS, javascript and HTML. The problem with blocking all these directories is that Google may not be able to render it correctly (if you have blocked a certain piece). For this reason, we do not block anything in the robots.txt file. You may think that this is a big security issues…but it’s not.

If you block your /wp-includes/ folder you may be blocking important code that google needs to render your page. You also don’t need to block /wp-admin/ anymore as WordPress now has default functionality to NOT index /wp-admin/ pages.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are HTML tags in the <head> section of your page. They tell search engines, bots and browsers what your page is about. Here is a list of every single meta tag there is.

You don’t have to be a SEO pro to know that meta tags are very important when it comes to WordPress SEO. Meta tags are pieces of meta data used by search engines to summarize your website for search engine results, browsers and social media sites.

Its important to know that the default WordPress installation DOES NOT include meta tags.

The most simple way to add meta tags to WordPress is to install a plugin that adds these features. The Yoast SEO plugin that we downloaded earlier has great support for meta tags. It allows you add custom meta tags for homepage, post types, taxonomies, archives and more. They offer custom variables that you can add that make creating keyword rich meta and title tags simple. Here is afull list of the Yoast SEO title and meta variables.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are HTML tags that tells search bots what your image is about. Using alt tags on all of your images will increase your rankings in both Google and Google Images.

Alt tags are really simple to use in WordPress and should be used for every image you upload and display.

To change the alt tags for your images in WordPress just head to the medium library, choose an image and you will see the fields on the right where you can add title, caption, alt text and description. We recommend that you use both the title and alt text tags for all images. The text should explain the images in 4 words or less and should be keyword rich. Here is how image alt tags look:

<img src="images/wordpress_seo.png" alt="wordpress seo image" />

Website Speed

Having a fast website is a very important part of WordPress SEO. WordPress is pretty fast out-of-the-box but it can be made much faster so you never have to worry about visitors leaving due to latency.

To check your website speed, pingdom provides the best tool to test website speed. It also tells you which resources are taking the most time to load and other websites’ load times.

Having the fastest website possible depends on a few different factors. One of them is having the right hosting. You should host your website on WordPress specific hosting servers that are built specifically for WordPress websites. Their servers have been configured to work the best with WordPress alone.

Apart from the server, website speed depends on a number of factors like how many posts, how many plugins, image sizes, how many external scripts you are running, etc. Most of these issues can be resolved by using caching.

W3 Total Cache is a plugin that speeds up your website by caching everything. When your website is cached, all the files are saved as static files so they can be retrieved faster by other users. This will decrease load times so your pages are 10x faster and your users are 10x happier!

Open Graph Protocol

The Open Graph protocol allows web pages to be easily readable by social media sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Have you ever noticed that when you share a webpage on Facebook it doesn’t add an image or text from the web page? This is because that page didn’t have Open Graph tags.

There are a good amount of plugins to add open graph tags to WordPress. Open graph is great for WordPress search engine marketing because it allows your website to be social media optimized. This way your social media shares, likes, comments, etc will be named correctly, with the right image and correct descriptions. Here are some of the more important Open Graph Meta tags:

WordPress SSL (HTTPS)

Until recently, having a secure site did not really have any ranking factor. But within the last few years, Google has updated its algorithm to give secure sites a ranking boots. If you simply add a SSL 2048-bit key certificate to your website, you could potential outrank your competitors that do not have SSL.

Not only is having a secure site good for WordPress SEO, it’s also good for user trust. Most people linking to a site will not do so unless they trust it. In order to be fully trusted with customer data and records, you must have a secure website. Do you buy stuff online when the website is not SSL secure? I would hope not, but if you do.. STOP!

To change your site to be HTTPS SSL secure you must first obtain a SSL certificate. Some hosting providers provide a free SSL certificate when you sign up for their hosting. You can also get a decent SSL certificate from Godaddy.

Once you have installed the SSL certificate on your domain, all you have to do is change your website url in the WordPress settings.

Simply change ‘http’ to ‘https’ and now WordPress should redirect to the secure version at ‘https’.

If you change it and you are getting an error on the front end, that means either you did not install the SSL certificate correctly or there are references to non-secure items on your page (i.e. a link to http://www.somewhereelse.com).